Brand Image and Brand Usage: Is a Forty-Year-Old Empirical Generalization Still Useful?

In this paper the authors provide evidence of the breadth and longevity of Andrew Ehrenberg’s work—a testimony to the quality of his research approach.

Brand Image and Brand Usage: Is a Forty-Year-Old Empirical Generalization Still Useful?

Jenni Romaniuk and Svetlana Bogomolova

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Francesca Dall’Olmo Riley

Kingston University

Management slant

  • The 1970 finding that consumers are strongly and systematically influenced by their relative past brand usage when they make brand-image associations (Bird, Channon, and Ehrenberg, 1970) still holds today despite the different marketing ecosystem.
  • Unless the relationship between brand image and brand usage is factored into customer based brand equity (CBBE) modeling, a higher response level for a brand on image attributes can easily be misinterpreted as a higher level of differentiation...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands